Michael Vernon Robinson is Brand and Design Director at Gruppo Bertone, an Italian firm known for its iconic and inspiring designs. Motortrades Insight’s Danny Hewitt spoke to the American-born designer about how inspiration for car designs is sourced and to what extent teamwork affects the final design of a vehicle. 

Car design is by in large a male-dominated industry. And so, most car designers get their inspiration from females. That’s where it all starts. 

The best designer in the world is the one above us, right? God. He makes the most beautiful design of the female shape and that’s where all the inspiration comes from. We try to get inspired by the female shape and come up with lines that have the same kind of beauty. And even if they’re not female, they still have to have that kind of breathtaking beauty that customers are accustomed to.

But after you have a look at all the girls in the world, designers just start looking at giant dogs and science fiction films and there’s an endless trail of areas we look to for inspiration.

The interesting thing about inspiration is that... there’s a brand new Volvo concept car that premiered at the Volvo stand at the Frankfurt Motor Show this year and the front end of it is identical to a Bertone concept car: the Jaguar B99 which we showed two years ago.

And you think, ‘that’s a Bertone design at the front of your Volvo!’ So the first reaction was, well, that’s not correct. The second reaction is that they were inspired by Bertone. So part of our job is to be inspired. Part of our job is to inspire others.

So we work very hard at doing things that we think will be inspiring to others. So the circle goes around. It’s a very important one.

It is this inspiration that drives Michael Vernon Robinson’s team to create concepts that are beautiful yet realistic, visions of the future that only come about as a result of an accumulation of ideas from not just one designer but many designers – male and female.

We don’t have supersize individuals that do all the hot designs and then others just follow up and pick up the crumbs. We have lots of very, very talented, very young designers within our team and they’re from all over the world. 

We have many, many different nationalities inside the team. Half of my guys are Italian. The other half come from all over the place, so whenever we have meetings, I have to do half of the meeting in English and half of the meeting in Italian.

It’s even more difficult in terms of day-to-day communication because only half speak Italian in my team.

As you can appreciate, many of them come from different cultures and have a different approach. But also, we’re doing a design for a client that comes from a different culture. So there are different cultures inside Bertone, which is an Italian company, doing work for a Chinese company, which has a different culture still. So we can’t force the Italian culture on a Chinese company who may or may not want to have an Italian look. They want to have the Chinese look.

And out of all this, we also have boy designers and girl designers so the male-female combination is very interesting because women come up with very, very different approaches to design than men do.

Everybody knows how to do things because she could be of a different nationality or have a different approach and no one had the answer to any of the projects including myself as a director. So I try to invite all to have their own visual ideas and then we can discuss them. We’ll put them up for discussion and then say, ‘What do you think of this design? Yes, no, yes, no, maybe?

So we come up with lots of really exciting and fabulous ideas for projects we’re working on every time.